Endless Thread - The Deadly Double

Episode Date: December 7, 2018

A Redditor finds a mysterious dice game in his grandparents’ basement. It reads “The Deadly Double: A Game to Play at Your Own Risk.” The Endless Thread team helps him investigate the game and finds surprising connections to Pearl Harbor, the FBI and The New Yorker.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the I-Lab at WBUR, Boston. It's not that often that we talk to a Redditor and their mom, but here we are. My name is Justin Bailey. I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I am Linda Talbert. I am from Janesville, Wisconsin. Justin, and if we're going to be technical, his mom made their first Reddit post not too long ago. I think I created my Reddit account probably a little over a year ago.

And one of the subreddits that I follow is a subreddit called What Is This Thing? It's basically crowdsourcing knowledge when a person discovers a thing out in the world. And they're like, Emery, they're like... What is this thing? Thank you. And the very intelligent people of Reddit chime in and they're like, oh, this is what it is. They can lead you to places you could find more information about it. That's where I posted my original post about the game, just in hopes that somebody as a part of that group, would know about it.

The game. It wasn't even really clear it was a game, not at first. It was just with the other stuff in the basement of Justin's grandparents' house, which had a lot of stuff in it. After Justin's grandfather passed away and his grandmother moved to assisted living, Justin and his mom started to go through the things in the basement. Linda, these are your parents, right? Correct. You know, we referred to them as organized hoarders, and they had a bunch of, they had a lot of stuff, but it was all neatly organized and packed away in boxes, and my dad built shelves for the basement

to store everything on. And, yep, they didn't believe in throwing things away. In this highly organized, multi-shelved basement full of stuff, Justin found a special box. I'm picturing you, like, blowing a layer of dust off of the top of the top of it. Yeah, I couldn't see inside the box when I was pulling it down. Inside the big box were a bunch of other boxes, board games and other odds and ends. But one of them stood out to Justin. The thing that struck me first was how not fragile it felt, but you could tell that it was older than everything else that was inside the box. It's kind of a faded green color with a small insignia on the top. And there's

a small little box with two dice inside of it and a little cardboard cover that says The Deadly Double, a game you play at your own risk. Copyright 1940 Monarch Publishing Company 500 Fifth Avenue, New York. Did you hear any like spooky sounds when you opened the box? Was there any kind of like, now you've done it? No, it definitely, it didn't, I didn't get any of that. at first.

All right, no spooky sound or voice, but the game was kind of mysterious looking. A two-headed eagle, like you might find on a coat of arms or something, with two X's on it. So did you two play the game? It sounds really dumb, but we haven't actually played the game. Oh, my gosh. What? Before you took the photos of the game that you put on Reddit, did you prepare the game in any way? Did you like tamper with the game at all before taking those pictures?

I did not. No, I did not. Did you notice what numbers the die were showing? I have no. I don't know. I don't know. Really? It's 12 and 7.

Is it 12 and 7? Yep. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I don't. Obviously, I know the significance of those numbers and with the game. But no, I have not potent or, Justin and his mom discovered that the game they found in their family's basement,

with dice showing the numbers 12 and 7 facing up, was connected to a conspiracy theory involving coded messages World War II, an issue of the New Yorker magazine and the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Today's episode, The Deadly Double. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Amory Sieverts. And you're listening to Endless Thread. the show featuring stories found on Reddit.

One does not simply walk into our show without saying how it is made, we are coming to you from Boston's NPR station, WBUR. So today's episode had us going down a rabbit hole, really a couple rabbit holes, following the clues around this mysterious game, The Deadly Double. Now, I know some stuff, Amory knows some stuff, and we're going to explore it together. In part because Justin and his mom, Linda, wanted our help learning more about this game. Linda's parents love to play games and her dad specifically

loved to talk about games. So it was weird that in all their family game times together, he hadn't mentioned this one. Doubly weird when they found some information about the game connecting it to a conspiracy theory involving the attack on Pearl Harbor. Like maybe the game was part of a secret code or signal involving the attack.

But there really wasn't a lot more than that. Are either of you guys open to conspiracies? Yeah, I mean, I'd been known to dabble into conspiracy theories. I think everyone's been up at 2 a.m. on a Saturday watching Netflix Michael Jackson conspiracy theories. I mean, don't get him started on the moonwalk in 69. Were we really ever on the moon? Who's to say? There's that.

Yeah, no, my kid's crazy. That crazy kid had left the family nest and moved to the Twin Cities to start. his adult life. But he never forgot about the game. And so he asked his mom to take some photos of it so he could post them on the What Is This Thing? Sub-reddit. And Justin finally got some ideas. A couple people sent me links to a website for a man named Kevin Cook, who happens to be the Guinness World Record holder for the largest dice collection in the world, which is kind of crazy to me. So they sent me a couple links to his website. and told me that maybe I could reach out to him.

Justin did reach out, and they messaged about Kevin maybe buying the game off of Justin. But neither of them were willing to name a price. There were so few copies of the game in existence that Justin didn't even know what to ask for. So the correspondence ended. But we wanted to know more. I had a conversation with Kevin, Amory. Are you ready to learn more about dice than you ever thought you wanted to know? Yes.

Okay. I am Kevin Cook. I am the owner of the world's largest collection of dice. I've been studying dice and dice production and so forth since about 1977, and I live in Colorado. How large is his dice collection? 84,517. Oh, my God. I'd have to have a separate bedroom in my apartment for my dice.

I asked him if his house was made of dye. Uh-huh. Of dice? Dice. Dice. Well, here's the thing. I also asked him about this. If you are going strictly by the Oxford English Dictionary, a dye is a single die.

Dice are two or more. So obviously we know this, but a lot of people mix them up, right? Including me, so we should just say that. One of my first questions to Kevin was, of course, have you ever been tempted to, like, Scrooge McDuck? Plop my tail feathers and call me baldie. Like dive into a pool of your... wealth of dice and swim in it? I've been asked to do it, but I've never been tempted because after, well, let's just say

20 years of organization cataloging and putting everything in the right box so I can find it, to take them out and do that would require that I recatalog everything. That's exactly what I expected him to say. Like, of course not. Everything is very orderly, Ben. Why would I create chaos? So I asked him about one of the more rare sets of dice that he might have? The strangest die I don't have.

I saw it for sale on eBay, and somebody was selling a set of dice made of human feces. That's the strangest one, and I said, I'll give that one a pass. Maybe you would also give that one a pass? Pass, hard pass. You're not trying to blow on that. dice and toss it onto the table. Okay, so obviously we're talking to Kevin not about the poop dice. We're talking to him about the deadly double dice.

A friend of mine and fellow collector had managed to pick up on eBay a set of these dice. And then he told me about them. And he did the research on it initially and told me about the rumor. What rumor are we talking? The rumor is that the dice were originally, the ads for it were originally published in order to signal to access agents within the United States access as an access and allies from World War II, that December 7th will be the day of the attack of Pearl Harbor. Another thing I was curious about is like the game itself. Like what kind of game is it? So Kevin described it as a version of this dice game called Put and Take, which I didn't really know.

Put and take is the modern version of Drayal. And you roll this, and if it says put one, you have to put one in the kitty. So you take one if there's one in the kitty, the middle of the board, whatever. You take one. Is it a fun game? Not for me. So you didn't really play the game when you got it? No.

Is it possible the game is cursed? All right, so we got a lot on the dice and just a few hints of this conspiracy theory. So it's time to go all in on the woe dude part of this whole story. And Ben's going to be the woe dude here because he's been working on other stuff. Okay, so so far we talked to Justin and his mom Linda. There's this connection to a conspiracy involving Pearl Harbor. we talked to dice collector, Kevin Cook, also mentioned this conspiracy involving Pearl Harbor.

And that's basically all I know. Here's the conspiracy theory, full out. Okay, hit me with all the facts. Hit me with everything. So the game is supposedly created in 1940, published by the Monarch Publishing Company, as Justin said. Yep. November of 1941.

Okay. A guy walks into the New Yorker magazine offices. He drops off some ads. that he wants to have published in the New Yorker for a game called The Deadly Double. Some accounts say he pays for the ads in cash and leaves. Those ads run in the November 22nd, 1941 edition of the New Yorker. There were like half a dozen teaser ads that appeared throughout the magazine,

and they looked like this. I have a picture for you. I'm going to ask you... She comes with props. Yes, I'm going to ask you to describe what you're seeing, though. It says, Aktung. Mm-hmm. Warning. Alet.

See advertisement page 86. Whoa, this is interesting. It's referring to another ad. It's like, go to this other page. Monarch Publishing Company, New York, and it's got a couple of dice on it. Mm-hmm. One white with the double X-12 and 24 numbers or sides. One black was 0, 7, and 5.

Right. So these are not your traditional dice with little dots. These have actual numbers printed on them. Yeah. So then, because it's... Go into page 86. Right. You see the full ad.

Describe that for me. Yeah. Oh, my God. This is weird. Okay. It has the Akhtung warning alert thing on it again. Right. And it's an image of a bunch of happy people playing a game of dice and all laughing.

And they're in a freaking bunker. Mm-hmm. And above are the kind of searchlights you would use to look at planes to get shot down. Yep, it's an air raid happening above them. Air raid, that's right, and explosions. Can you read the paragraph there? Yes, yes. We hope you'll never have to spend a long winter's night in an air raid shelter.

But we were just thinking it's only common sense to be prepared. If you're not too busy between now and Christmas, why not sit down and plan a list of the things you'll want to have on hand? Yeah, great idea. between now and Christmas. And though it's no time really to be thinking of what's fashionable, we bet that most of your friends will remember to include those intriguing dice and chips, which make Chicago's favorite game, The Deadly Devil.

Yeah, Chicago's favorite game, but supposedly made in New York, and they're using a depiction of an air raid to market it. This, I would say, is a not well-advised advertising campaign. Yeah. Again, this runs in the November 22nd edition, 1941. 16 days later, December 7th, the Pearl Harbor attack happens, of course. War on the horizon, the United States was attacked by the Japanese Empire. And shortly after that, some New Yorker readers revisit these ads and they're like, wait a minute. 12, 7.

Yeah, what were the numbers pictured on the dice in those ads? 12 and 7, the date of the attack. The number 24 was also shown in there, and they wondered if that was referring to the latitude of Pearl Harbor. Whoa. Yeah. And then the XX, they're like, oh, that's the Axis Powers. That must mean Germany and Japan, aka the deadly double, are those the deadly double? Huh.

And the idea is that there is like some sort of coded messages being delivered via the advertising for the game or something. Yeah. They thought that these ads may have been a warning to either actual Japanese spies or Japanese sympathizers who were in the U.S. That an attack was coming. Okay. Coded language about an upcoming military attack that brought the United States into World War II via advertising for a dice game in the public pages of the New Yorker. And nobody alive has played? Except us in the very, very near future.

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Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash Creative Studio. It's the green box. The green box. So, Justin and his

mom, Linda, were kind enough to send us their copy of The Deadly Double so that we could play it at our own risk. We're not going to make you listen to the whole thing, but just so you get the idea, Amory, producer Josh, sound designer Paul, and yours truly did

the deadly dirty double deed. Here come the highlights. Wait, what's in the dice box? What do you think is in the dice box, Ben? If matching numbers come up on the two dice, the player takes all. The red or worth 10? I thought the white were worth 10. No?

Let's throw us some dice. Okay. That tender roll. He's got that gentle, very gentle roll. Yeah. I can even notice. Make your bets, make your bets. You got the pot.

You got the kitty. Come here, kitty, kitty, kitty. This is where I win the pot. Oh, ugh. It's a big pot right there. Josh. Okay, so yes, we played the game, but we also did some digging into this conspiracy theory. Well, Josh and Amory did.

They kept me in the dark, but they reported back. Little to nothing is known about this game. intelligence experts to historians, nobody really seems to know much about it. Okay. There don't seem to be many copies of the game out there. Right. Justin has one. Kevin has just the dice.

And claims another friend had one. Right. But if you hop on eBay, there's not a single copy available on eBay right now. We know about maybe three in existence. Maybe. Right. So that could lead some to wonder, you know, maybe only a few copies were made of this game in the first place. So we did a lot of reading on this, and here's what we found. One point of

suspicion is that the return address that was on those ads dropped off of the New Yorker was 505th Avenue in Manhattan. It's an office building that at the time just happened to also house the Japanese consulate. There was also an account from the LA Times back in the 80s where a former naval pilot wrote about a conversation that he'd had with this intelligence intelligence officer, and that officer was asked to investigate the game, and he couldn't find a single copy. Ooh. Okay.

So now you kind of have me. I'm hooked now because to me, that is the most compelling weirdness. Yeah, that someone remembers a conversation from the 40s with someone who is looking into the game, and there ain't no game. And that's like the first sign usually of a company that's BS, like something funky is going on. You're like, you walk in, you're like, oh, yeah. I'll have one of your widgets, and then they turn out to be a total shell company. They're like, and then you're like, wait, something's going on here.

Yeah, and then also the creator of the game, Roger Paul Craig. He worked for the Office of Strategic Services at some point. This is the progenitor to the CIA. So he has a background in intelligence. Now, I have to admit, according to his OSS file, he worked there from 1944 to 1945. So after the ads came out in the New Yorker. Right. But still, you know, having any sort of connection with the intelligence world,

that'll keep some wheels turning in people's minds. Yeah, it'll keep the tinfoil hats on. Then Roger Paul Craig died in early death in 1946, and they're conflicting accounts of how it happened. Suspicious, we don't know, but untimely, at least. Okay. And then finally, even though this conspiracy may seem farfetched today, It was apparently believable enough that the FBI, the U.S. Navy, and the L.A. Times all conducted their own investigations into the game and the ads back in the 1940s.

Okay. What else we got? Well, now we, I guess, have to look at some of the debunking. Let's bunk it up. So May of 1942, a journalist with the L.A. Times named Chapin Hall identifies Roger Paul Craig, because before that, nobody. knew who made this game. Okay. Craig admits that he placed those ads in the New Yorker, but he says,

conspiracy, no, it's all coincidence. The numbers 12 and 7 on the dice had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor. He would say that. He would. I reached out to the New Yorker. Their understanding is that this was just an early attempt at viral marketing.

Ooh. Yep, that Roger Paul Craig is just like, hey, this is juic. What's juicier right now than... Playing a dice game in a bunker. Right. Right. Another thing is, do you remember the other number that I mentioned that people found suspicious on the dice?

24. 24. Which remember people thought was the latitude of Pearl Harbor. It's not. The latitude is closer to 21 degrees north. Well, I mean, I knew that. That was clear from the beginning. Clearly.

So that part of this was kind of deflated. Okay. But we also called in some backup on this debunking. You called for backup? We did. We called for backup. Where's the walkie-talkie? Where's the radio? I don't have it, but I know someone who might.

Wildcat, this is a screaming eagle. So remember how I said the FBI investigates Roger Paul Craig and the deadly double ads. And we figured if anyone was going to know more about that, it would be someone like this. I'm Ray Bad Fennis. I'm a retired FBI agent, spent. 25 years with the FBI. I'm the author of two books, The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence, and Hoover's Secret War Against Axis spies. Does it seem possible to you that the FBI would have investigated the deadly double ads in the New Yorker?

Without question. Why is that? Well, the FBI would have been at the point of the spear in looking into possible evidence of, leaks in the government. So there's no question in my mind that there is a file someplace identifying all of this in exactly what they did. And they would have completely run it to ground. So Ben, we're looking for that FBI file, by the way. We've submitted a FOIPA Freedom of Information slash Privacy Act request for it. So we'll do an update in four years. Right. We are, as you may have guessed, still waiting to hear back. We will update you. They didn't get back since

last week? They didn't get back? Not yet. But as for Ray, he doesn't feel like he needs to see the file to know that whatever the FBI learned about the Deadly Double or the New Yorker ads, it didn't amount to anything. The reality was that Japan

had a very poor record of espionage here during the war and before the war. It really wasn't that good. Do you have any thoughts as to why there were military-themed images in them and, you know, it showed people in an air raid bunker with the words

warning, warning, warning all around? The only speculation I can offer is based on the fact that the war in Europe was in the news every day. So it's possible that the author used this theme in order to perhaps drum up publicity for his game. This is a good point. Like, looking back on Pearl Harbor 77 years later, we forget that although the U.S. hadn't entered World War II yet,

this was on everybody's mind. The fear of an attack was really real. But I do want to say this. So there's this Snopes article from 2016 that claims that the deadly double conspiracy has been debunked. But that Snopes piece just relies on the alleged conspirators saying that they weren't conspirators. And that is just not, that's not very satisfying.

So either it's a total conspiracy cover-up, or it's just a really, really, really unsuccessful board game. That's exactly right. But something that is worth exploring is whether it's worth any money. No, it's nothing that anybody's going to get too excited. This is Noel Barrett, and he's a toy auctioneer and appraiser, and he says dice games are just not a hot ticket. Given the fact that the game seems to be pretty rare, though,

Would there be any value? Rare has nothing to do with anything. Value is it. Okay, that's interesting. Because I would think based on the fact that we can find so little information about this game. You know, there's another key. This is something I get all the time. Somebody says, I've looked all over the Internet.

I can't find anything about it. Because it's not good. Nobody cares. But we kind of care. Like you and I care. We care. Justin cares. He cares.

Yep. Kevin Cook cares. Right? So you'd think the juiciness of its history would give it some sort of greater value. I don't think so. Noel, the dream crusher. Noel!

Noel's just part of the cover-up, man. He's trying to throw us off the trail. Maybe so. Okay, I think we need to call Justin back and tell him what we learned. That his game is worthless. It's hard. It's going to be hard, but he's got to know the truth.

Justin, good news. Okay. We played the game and we're still alive. Sweet. I would have felt really bad if anything happened. The game was fun. We had actually a pretty good time playing the game. I highly recommend it.

Well, as soon as I get it back, me and my girlfriend will play it. The bad news is it's not worth anything. Yeah, and that was kind of what I was thinking. Like I said, I had a couple people reach out to me and one person said that it is a rare game. but he didn't know if the value would really be there. It's a conversation piece. Exactly, exactly. Did anybody give you a number?

So Kevin, Kevin Cook, who you could not quite get a squeeze a price out of. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He did tell me what he paid for the dice part of the game on eBay. Okay. 1499. $1,49 for the dice. $15. Regardless, it's a cool piece of history that my mom and I can share.

Yeah. It's not something you hear every day that I have a dice game that has conspiracy theory ties to Pearl Harbor. That's a crazy sentence to say. And the fact that we still, we're never going to know how my grandfather came into the possession of this game. He's passed and my grandmother has no idea. we're just not going to know. So it's crazy that this was sitting in their basement for who knows how long. And that's how conspiracy theories are born.

In the basement. Justin, thank you very much for sending us the game and for telling us your story. Thank you guys for doing all of this. But the story isn't over yet. Good morning. Hey, Priscilla. It's Amory. How are you? I'm good, Amory. How are you? I'm great. Thank you again for making time. At the 11th hour, the day we were wrapping up this episode, someone from the game maker's family who we'd been trying and trying to reach got back to us.

My name is Priscilla Cole. I live in Fairfield, New Jersey. And I am the middle child of Roger Paul Craig. And he is the dreamer, designer of the deadly double. Can you tell me a little bit about the family lore about your dad and about the game that he created, what the family knew about all of that? Very little. We were very young at this time, obviously. I was born in 1937, my sister in 36, and then my younger sister in 39, I believe. So we were very small. And my parents, were separated when we were little. Your father died pretty young, right? He died. He was in an accident. I've read it was a car accident, but I know it was not. He actually was trying to climb in a window with one of his buddies.

I don't know if they were trying to get into, sneak into something or whatever, but he fell down into an elevator shaft, and he was badly hurt. He did get to a hospital, but he died. there. Given what you know about your father and what you've heard about the game, do you personally ever wonder about the Pearl Harbor connection? Of course I've wondered, but my mother was so adamant about the fact that there was no conspiracy. Sure. You know, she spoke with the FBI. She spoke with the New York Times.

when they were writing something about it. So she was interviewed many times, and she said, absolutely not. And I just think it's a huge coincidence. And isn't it fun? We're having a good time with it. What else did you learn about the game and I guess about your father's efforts to make the game and stuff like that? I don't know.

I don't know anything about that. I know that they collaborated. My mother and my father collaborated on it. I suspect that the picture that's used to advertise the game, one of them were there all in a shelter. I suspect that my mother might have drawn that. She was a designer. And looking at those faces look very much like some of the design work that we have. Do you feel any connection to the game, The Deadly Double?

Have you ever played it? I've never seen it. In my mind, I wonder how many games were made. I know that the monarch publishing company, which supposedly was supposed to be making them, that was, I think, a figment of my father's imagination. Oh, really? Wow. We've wondered about that.

But that's, you know, I guess that's what you would do if you're trying to hype something. But no, I've never seen or heard the game. We've played the game. How have you played it? So someone reached out to us about a young man... You know this part already. But for Priscilla, this was mind-blowing that a game that had existed only as family lore for decades was real.

Was there any kind of a mark, a trademark, anything on the box? It says 1940 Monarch Publishers. company. But that's, yep, that's all that we know about it. Do you enjoy playing games, Priscilla? I love games. We are a game family. You name it we not.

That's so interesting that you're such a game family, and yet you have this game in your family history, and you haven't been able to play it. We didn't even know it actually existed. Wow. Well, we're glad to deliver it. deliver you that news and to tell you that it's a fun game to play, and we'll try to get it to you so that you can enjoy it. I would really love that.

I tell you, my two sisters who both live overseas are so excited about it, and we'll get together as a family as if we can't get it and play it. Do you think this guy wants to sell it? No. He's, I think he's open to it. I think he's open, yeah. He's open to it. I would be interested in figuring out how to contact him. Yeah.

Or he, me, whatever. Priscilla, thank you so much for talking to us. We were so excited to hear from you, and we're really excited to put you in touch with Justin, and I hope that that continues to be a happy ending to this story. I hope so, too. I'll keep you posted. Are you going to email...

Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR Station, in partnership. with Reddit. Our show is a dream realized by Jessica Alpert, and when we talked about playing the deadly double, she said, What could go wrong? Iris Adler is our executive producer, and man, don't get into a bunker with her unless you want to get into a boss fight. Mix and sound design by Paul Vicus and John Parati, who would like to place some ads in the newspaper for dogs with jobs. Our web producer is Megan Kelly, and when we showed her the New Yorker ad, she said, What is this thing? Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit, who thinks board games, are...

Propaganda posters. Josh Swartz is our producer, and his favorite conspiracy theory involves monks looking at beer. Extra production assistance from James Lindberg. Our intern is Candice Lim. Oh, my God. Our theme music is by Squelcher. Thanks to Justin and Linda for posting that photo of the game to Reddit,

and that is our artwork this week. You can check it out at WBUR.org slash endless thread. Nicholas Reynolds, thanks to you for digging around in the National Archive for us. On Reddit, we are endless underscore thread. If you want to contribute art for an upcoming episode or give us a juicy story tip so we can tell it like we did today, hit us up there. My co-host and producer is Amory Sievertson. I'm senior producer and host Ben Brock Johnson. I'll let myself out.